Live transcription (experimental V0)

Default-off, local-development-only integration for boring-ui [folder]. Enable it with BORING_LIVE_TRANSCRIPTS_ENABLED=1 and run the pinned loopback WhisperLiveKit CPU tiny service documented in docs/issues/912/spikes/whisperlivekit/README.md.

V0 provides a microphone button in the composer for short in-memory dictation; stopping inserts the returned French text into the editable draft. The same short-dictation control becomes a stop button with an elapsed-time counter while capturing. Live mode streams microphone PCM to the loopback service and writes a Markdown transcript. By default it does not retain audio. Trusted local hosts may opt into private AAC/M4A recording by passing an absolute audioRecordingDirectory (and optionally audioRecordingFfmpegPath) to createLiveTranscriptServerPlugin; PCM is piped directly through FFmpeg and never accumulated in memory. Anonymous Speaker N labels and French text may be inaccurate. Kyutai word events are grouped into readable pause-bounded transcript paragraphs. While capture is active, the live process is the only supported transcript writer: byte/mtime conflict checks are best effort and are not atomic. Every 60 seconds, a changed projected revision creates one visible review turn in the originating Pi chat when it is idle; /review transcript requests the current revision immediately or coalesces it until idle. Review prompts treat transcript text as untrusted data and never as instructions. To override the built-in review focus, a workspace may create an optional .agents/live-transcription/review.md; it is read again at each dispatch, bounded to 32 KiB, and cannot replace the fixed untrusted-transcript safety envelope. Missing, empty, oversized, or invalid UTF-8 files use the built-in review instructions. Production/shared deployment is unsupported.

Kyutai streaming backend

The default backend remains WhisperLiveKit. To use a local Kyutai moshi-server, select its adapter and forward a remote server to loopback when necessary (the plugin deliberately never connects to a non-loopback upstream):

export BORING_LIVE_TRANSCRIPTS_ENABLED=1
export BORING_LIVE_TRANSCRIPTS_PROVIDER=kyutai
export BORING_KYUTAI_URL=ws://127.0.0.1:18880/api/asr-streaming
export BORING_KYUTAI_API_KEY=public_token # omit when the local server needs no key
# Optional: enrich only /live transcripts with best-effort speaker labels.
export BORING_LIVE_TRANSCRIPTS_DIARIZER_URL=ws://127.0.0.1:18881/v1/diarize
# Optional: start/stop on-demand compute through the root-owned lease daemon.
export BORING_LIVE_TRANSCRIPTS_LIFECYCLE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:18882/v1
export BORING_LIVE_TRANSCRIPTS_LIFECYCLE_BEARER_TOKEN=<lifecycle token>

The adapter captures native 24 kHz PCM16 for Kyutai, converts it to float32 MessagePack Audio messages, and sends a Marker plus bounded silence on stop. Without an optional diarizer, Kyutai /live Markdown is intentionally speaker-neutral: timestamped paragraphs are rendered without invented Speaker 1 labels. When the optional loopback diarizer is configured, /live also sends a 16 kHz copy to the raw Streaming Sortformer sidecar and assigns Kyutai words by overlap with its anonymous speaker intervals. Kyutai remains the text authority; uncovered words render as Speaker unknown, and sidecar setup/runtime failures do not interrupt capture. See services/sortformer/README.md for the PoC service contract. See services/lifecycle/README.md for secure on-demand GPU operation. With Kyutai selected, the composer microphone streams each Word event directly into the editable draft without creating a transcript or recording file. /live start keeps the separate Markdown transcript and agent-review sink, and creates a matching .m4a only when local recording is explicitly configured.

Robustness gates

The package-local systematic gate composes the real Fastify routes, a real browser WebSocket client, and a scripted loopback WhisperLiveKit WebSocket. It covers exact Host/Origin rejection, nonce redemption, PCM ACK/forwarding, Markdown projection, session-bound automatic review, idempotent stop, active shutdown, and fresh-process restart. Provider, manager, projector, review, and drain race/boundary suites run in the same gate:

pnpm --filter @hachej/boring-transcription test:system
pnpm --filter @hachej/boring-transcription typecheck

The deterministic gate does not claim that a deployed host has ffmpeg, model assets, credentials, or acceptable transcription quality. Before relying on a local deployment, also run the pinned contract proof and CPU stream probe from docs/issues/912/spikes/whisperlivekit/README.md, exercise POST /v1/audio/transcriptions with synthetic WebM/Opus, and run docs/issues/912/spikes/whisperlivekit/gh912-live-transcript-deployment-probe.py to verify one 60-second automatic review appears, receives an assistant response in the exact originating chat, and still ends with a complete Markdown transcript.